Hank Shaw, author of "Duck, Duck, Goose: Recipes and Techniques for Cooking Ducks and Geese, both Wild and Domesticated," with a pheasant he shot during in South Dakota in 2012. Shaw, who took up hunting in his 30s has authored two books and operates a website, honest-food.net.
(Pioneer Press Dave Orrick)

Hank Shaw, author of "Duck, Duck, Goose: Recipes and Techniques for Cooking Ducks and Geese, both Wild and Domesticated," walks out of the marsh after a morning duck hunt with friend Chris Niskanen Friday, Oct.11, 2013. Shaw credits Niskanen with introducing him to hunting and mentoring him while both men worked at the Pioneer Press.
(Pioneer Press Dave Orrick)

His second book, “Duck, Duck, Goose: Recipes and Techniques for Cooking Ducks and Geese, both Wild and Domestic” (Ten Speed Press, hard cover, $24.99), was published this month.

Although the 43-year-old Californian hasn’t skyrocketed to household-name status the way celebrity chefs or hunters with TV shows do, he is well-established in the realm of food-loving home cooks (some would be offended if I called them “foodies”) and making his way rapidly into the domain of hunters open to the idea that there’s more to a mallard than a pair of skinless, fatless breasts (some would be offended if I called them “old school”).

And if you aren’t open to that idea, Shaw will try to persuade you.

“Cooking a duck or goose — a whole bird, from bill to feet — is real cooking. True, honest cooking,” he wrote in the introduction to “Duck, Duck, Goose.”

Yet, Shaw allows, it does all start with the breast.

“A perfect duck breast is a revelation, a life-changing event,” he wrote.

So my question to him, as we sat on the edge of a marsh on a recent evening, sipping spirits as woodcocks flittered overhead and geese honked in the distance, was whether that first mallard, handed to him more than a decade ago, was the sole reason his life was what it is today, or whether he would have arrived here anyway?

I especially posed the question because sitting with us was the friend who handed him the mallard, the same guy who later that fall introduced Shaw to pheasant hunting and became his mentor. That friend was Chris Niskanen, who preceded me as the Pioneer Press’ outdoors writer and now hangs his hat in the offices of the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources as its communications director. Shaw, a New Jersey native, was a political reporter at the paper at the time.

Earlier in the evening, Shaw had been holding court inside Chefs Abode, a cooking school in Lilydale.

More than two dozen people huddled around the scruffy, bespectacled guy as he transformed a pile of goose breasts into sausage.

The crowd was a mix of food lovers sipping wine and hunters slurping beer — a mix like Shaw. His scruffiness could be from hours spent over the range or days in the field.

Shaw straddles the realms of young foodies looking for culinary advice and grizzled hunters seeking the same.

You’re as likely to hear him on National Public Radio’s “The Splendid Table” as you are to see him at Pheasant Fest.

“It’s a constant balance,” he told me later. “I don’t want to talk down to serious home cooks, and I don’t want to talk over the heads of hunters and anglers.”

Lest hunters reading this assume Shaw is at heart a foodie who could care less about the conservation heritage of hunters, a quick read of his website serves as evidence to the contrary.

In one essay, “On Joining,” Shaw verges on scolding his fellow adult-onset hunters who “spurn their cousins in what I call the ‘traditional’ hunting community.” His message: Join Ducks Unlimited, the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, Trout Unlimited, Pheasants Forever and their ilk.

His site draws a major constituency from California’s enormous nonhunting culinary crowd, and videos and photographs explaining how to gut an animal are sometimes met with anti-hunting vitriol. To which he responds with well-rehearsed arguments that, for those of who hunt, at least, are irrefutable.

Hardly playing the sycophant to the “traditional” hunter, however, Shaw has plenty of criticism for such practices as breasting out a bird, which falls within his wheelhouse of pet peeves.

I watched Shaw play the diplomat when pheasant legs, skins and giblets were tossed into a trash bin en masse after a large party hunt last year in South Dakota. He never raised an objection. Within a few minutes, though, he was putting on an impromptu demonstration of how to dry-pluck a rooster.

In January, he wrote an essay on the topic. In an accompanying Facebook post, he included the weighty words “wanton waste.” I wanted to know: Does he regard breasting out a bird — removing the breast meat and leaving the rest of the bird for scavengers or the garbage man — as wanton waste or just a culinary sin?

“I think it’s an ethical lapse,” he said, citing Montana law that demands hunters keep the legs of anything larger than a teal. “It’s the equivalent of taking only the backstraps of deer. Should it be legislated? I don’t know. I’m not a guy who thinks government is always the answer. I’d like to do my part to convince people, so it would never have to be legislated.”

“OK, Hank,” I said. “But after the duck opener, I had three teal that I shot in the morning, and it was after midnight by the time I was home, ready to deal with them. And I had, you know, home duties coming that morning. I felt bad about it, but I breasted them out because I just needed to get to bed.”

Shaw knew the scenario.

“I get this question a lot,” he said. “There are two options for you. You could have hung your birds. Most birds, including ducks, will hang well if they’re not shot up in the guts. And they’ll keep in the fridge if it’s warm outside. Just put them into plastic bags so your kid doesn’t get into them. Or, you can skin the teal, breast out the meat and use the rest for soup.”

This is what drew me to Shaw, who had left the Pioneer Press before I arrived and whom I first “met” through his writings. In his books — and especially on his website, where there’s an opportunity for back and forth — he offers practical solutions for practical hunting obstacles once the animal is down. As a rookie hunter myself, I especially related to his first book, “Hunt, Gather, Cook: Finding the Forgotten Feast,” in which he talks frankly about the experience of starting off with hunting skills that border on incompetence.

These days, when he’s not on a book tour, he estimates he spends close to 30 days waterfowl hunting each season. That still leaves him time to pursue pheasants, quail, squirrels, deer and everything else one might hunt.

Last year, Shaw said he had begun to earn enough money to go full time in the pursuit. It’s a small operation, consisting of Shaw alone. His longtime girlfriend, Holly Heyser, takes many of the photographs, and her work is on display in the pages of “Duck, Duck, Goose.” Heyser, who also started hunting as an adult, has worked to recruit female hunters. She is the editor of the California Waterfowl Association’s magazine.

Which leads us back to Shaw’s mentor, Niskanen, and that question of whether or not he would have taken up hunting were the pair not friends.

There is no definitive answer, but there is consensus that, given the movement of food-lovers taking up arms in the woods and marshes, Shaw probably was destined to hunt, sooner or later. As the spirits flow and conversation rolls, I can tell that Shaw is no longer an apprentice. His travels have taken him across the continent, and his knowledge of the new trends in what might be a renaissance of hunting — and is certainly a renaissance of ducks in the kitchen — have the mentor asking as many questions as the apprentice once did.

The next morning, we would wake up before the sun, stumble into the reeds and attempt to entice a wood duck or goose into range. No shots would be fired, and soon Shaw would pack up the cardboard boxes that are his closet and desk on his book tour, undertaken on the chassis of a Toyota Tacoma with more than 300,000 miles on it.

He was off to Madison, Wis., where he would put on more demonstrations and dinner, and perhaps forage or hunt or fish if he found company and time.

It’s a small-scale way to make a living and spread a message, but in his stop here, he made at least one convert.

Dave Olson drove from St. Cloud, Minn., to Lilydale at the urging of his son and his desire to turn his extra pheasant meat into sausage.

“I’d never heard of him, and I watch a lot of hunting shows,” Olson said as he munched on Shaw’s goose sausage. “I wanted to find out who he is, so I looked around the Internet. You know, he’s actually pretty well-known. After seeing him do his stuff, I can see why. I’m impressed.”

As outdoors editor for the Pioneer Press, Orrick fishes, paddles, hunts, skis and romps across the region while staying on top of outdoors news. When the occasion demands, he's also been known to cover topics ranging from politics to golf. He lives in St. Paul with his wife and son.​

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